Lionsgate released Winchester on 2 February 2018.

It tells the fictionalized story of Sarah Winchester and her crazy house. The legend claims that she kept building to appease the ghosts of people killed by her husband’s guns. I’ve always thought that kind of hard to believe. The filmmakers take this idea and make it real. That works much better!

The critics hated this movie! I read a lot of reviews to understand why. I still find it hard to say. Mostly, they don’t like it because they wanted it to be a different film. In particular, they wanted it to be surprising in some way they can’t articulate. And they are mad about it! I get it. A superhero film can just be a superhero film. But a ghost story much somehow be more than a ghost story. Or something.

But this is a very good film! I love haunted house films. This isn’t as good as The Awakening but it is better than The Haunting.

Some people would not like this film because it has a lot of jump scares. I assume this is what people are talking about when they tell me they don’t like horror.

Truth is, I don’t especially like jump scares. They are very effective on me! But they are also kind of a cheat. They always come with a loud music cue. As though the visual is not enough.

At the same time, jump scares allow filmmakers to mess with the audience. You should know that the scare never comes when you expect it. Films build up to it and then don’t deliver. When you relax, the jump scare is released.

But jump scares really aren’t that important to horror. Most of David Cronenberg’s horror films are devoid of them. And even Night of the Living Dead foregoes them. I think they tend to appear in films out of desperation.

The film really doesn’t need them. But the producers used everything they had in this film. That turned out to be a bad idea — at least in terms of the critics. I don’t think they take anything away from the film. They are used effectively.

I recommend watching Winchester. It is an effective and engaging film.

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Winchester (2018) poster via IMDb under Fair Use.

William Lustig was born on 1 February 1955.

He directed a number of psychotronic delights and that’s why I’m highlighting him now. But I could also have highlighted him for a different reason. Back in 2002, he founded Blue Underground. It is one of the best home video distributors. I have many discs from them. It is kind of like an American Arrow Video.

I don’t really know anything about Lustig. But he worked as a crewmember on a number of films in the late 1970s. And he apparently worked as production manager on a couple of Dario Argento films shot in New York.

William Lustig started directing porn films. So his first two films were The Violation of Claudia (1977) and Hot Honey (1978). But he directed them under the name Billy Bagg. In 1980, he used the money made from these films to produce and direct Maniac, his first “legitimate” feature film.

Maniac was very successful as was the follow-up, Vigilante. Lustig didn’t direct any films for a few years after that. But in 1988, he teamed up with New York independent filmmaking legend Larry Cohen. Cohen produced and wrote Maniac Cop and had Lustig direct. He made two sequels, the first is excellent.

After the first Maniac Cop, Lustig made Hit List and Relentless, two action films with a lot of violence. And he made Uncle Sam in 1996, his only since the last Maniac Cop film.

You can’t miss with any William Lustig film. Even the third Maniac Cop is worth watching. But I think we should go back to Maniac itself. It’s a remarkable film.

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William Lustig via Slasher Trash under Fair Use.

Larry Buchanan was born on 31 January 1923.

I always mix up Buchanan with Larry Cohen. They both wrote and directed a film called It’s Alive. Cohen made the one with the iconic TV commercial. It’s also far better. Buchanan made a pretty standard “I have a monster that must be fed” film. It’s okay. The monster is ridiculous, though!

I’m not much of a fan of Buchanan. Like Andy Milligan, I admire him. But it’s hard to get through most of his films. I’m not alone! Michael Weldon had a few choice words. I thought it might be fun to grab them from his reviews:

• The Eye Creatures (1965): “If you’ve seen Invasion of the Saucermen and happen to catch this awful uncredited remake on TV while you’re falling asleep, you’ll probably doubt your sanity. The story is the same, but instead of scary little aliens, there are full-sized men in ill-fitting lumpy costumes with a lot of eyes, and John Ashley is the hero! Headlights make the creatures blow up real good. Add some voyeur army personnel and you’re got the worst of the worst.”
• Curse of the Swamp Creature (1966): “An all-time favorite of American insomniacs.”
• In the Year 2889 (1966): An “uncredited remake of Corman’s The Day the World Ended. The people hiding out from postnuclear mutants have a nicer house in this version, but wait’ll you see the monsters. Wow!”
• Mars Needs Women (1966): “You’ll love [Tommy Kirk] in this made-for-television travesty.”
• Zontar: The Thing From Venus (1966): “This inept hit is so popular that SCTV did a takeoff and there’s a Boston-based magazine named after it.”
• Creature of Destruction (1967): “Buchanan made four uncredited remakes of AIP ’50s science-fiction movies. They all belong on anybody’s top ten worst list. This isn’t the worst of them, but it’s still rotten to the core.”
• It’s Alive (1968): “One of Buchanan’s legendary awful quickie television movies.”
• Sex and the Animals (1969): “It opens with turkeys mating to Ravi Shankar music. This ‘adult’ documentary is nothing but footage of wild animals mating.”
• Mistress of the Apes (1981): “Important social statements from the director of Zontar: The Thing From Venus.” [Weldon is being sarcastic but Buchanan really was socially conscious. You see it especially in many of the films I did not list here.]
• The Loch Ness Horror (1982): “Characters spend a lot of time talking, and when the Loch Ness monster shows up it’s really unconvincing.”
• Beyond the Doors (1983): “A lot of time is spent showing actor clones of the rock stars live in concert. Each one of them performs three whole songs that sound sort of like songs made famous by the originals. You might recognize bits of familiar lyrics but not enough for Larry to have to pay any copyright fees.”

Weldon didn’t hate Larry Buchanan. He said of High Yellow, “This Dallas production shows how good Buchanan was before those AIP-TV movies.” But of more interest to psychotronic fans is his first film, The Naked Witch. So let’s watch that!

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Larry Buchanan via Fort Worth Magazine under Fair Use.

Lionsgate Home Entertainment released Prey on DVD on 30 January 2007. It premiered a couple of months earlier at the American Film Market. Otherwise, it had no theatrical release in the US.

People hate this film! But it isn’t for the usual nonsense reasons. Overall, critics found it pat. It tells the story of a family visiting South Africa. Dad has to work so the rest of the family go on a wildlife tour and things go horribly wrong. It’s kind of like Cujo.

I think the film is fine. But the critics are not wrong. The screenplay is shockingly generic. It could have been made in the 1930s without changing anything. But is this a problem?

I love when a script surprises me. The reveal at the end of The Power of the Dog blew me away. But this is rare. I learned one thing from my misspent youth. I guess plots very well. As a result, I don’t expect clever plots. And I’ve come to the conclusion that audiences don’t need them as much as they think they do in order to enjoy a film.

I wrote about this recently, Scanners and Great Movie Endings. There just aren’t many great plot ideas. We enjoy the journey, not the destination.

Each year, Hollywood releases roughly 500 films into US movie theaters. If you consider the world and all venues, the number jumps close to 10,000. And this is in an environment in which there are roughly half a million films ever made! We would all have more than enough filmed entertainment for the rest of our lives with no new films.

I’m not saying Prey is a great film. It isn’t even a particularly good film. I especially hate the angry daughter trope. But it tells a compelling story. It is engaging. Many people would enjoy it if critics didn’t tell them they wouldn’t.

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Prey (2007) poster via Wikpedia under Fair Use.

Channel 4 first presented Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace on UK TV in 29 January 2004. They released it on the internet the day before to US viewers.

Garth Marenghi (Matthew Holness) is a highly successful horror writer of titles such as Juggers, Afterbirth, and, of course, the Slicer series. According to him, “I’m one of the few people you’ll meet who’s written more books than they’ve read.” He is very ignorant but he makes up for it by being even more arrogant. In the 1980s, Channel 4 paid for this TV series about a hospital where horrific things happen. But Channel 4 didn’t air it owing to how “dangerous” it was. Two decades later, TV was “suffering through the worst artistic drought in broadcast history.” So the channel came crawling back.

Garth stars in the show. He is joined by his publisher, Dean Learner (Richard Ayoade). He is loyal but even more of an idiot than Garth. The series also includes Todd Rivers (Matt Berry) and Madeleine Wool (Alice Lowe). Of course, those are the names of the actors. They have different names in the series.

It is a parody of 1980s horror TV. This includes the kind of ridiculous special effects we all love from shows like Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) and Chuck E Cheese in the Galaxy 5000 (1999). The show is very funny. But it would probably be more funny if it weren’t so true to its conceit. Holness and Ayoade co-wrote it with the latter directing all six episodes.

All the principals are of note for psychotronic fans:

• Matthew Holness: In general, he’s a comedian. But he wrote and directed the exceptional horror film Possum.
• Richard Ayoade: He’s hard to miss. As an actor, he was in The Watch and The IT Crowd. Darkplace was the first time he directed but he’s done it a lot since then.
• Matt Berry: He seems to be everywhere these days. He too was in The IT Crowd. And most recently, he was in What We Do in the Shadows.
• Alice Lowe: She probably works more than the others. And starting with the excellent Prevenge, she has been writing and directing.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is great from top to bottom. Here are all the episodes via Archive:

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Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace front cover via Wikipedia under Fair Use.

Jack Hill turns 93 today. He was born on 28 January 1933.

He was an incredibly successful exploitation filmmaker from the late 1960s into the early 1980s. Also, he worked on the side as a screenwriter for films like City on Fire and Death Ship.

Today, he is probably best known for writing and directing Spider Baby: or, the Maddest Story Ever Told. But I don’t want to talk about it. It’s a favorite of mine. But I’ve watched it dozens of times. And I wrote an article about star Jill Banner, which is the most popular page on this site.

Hill directed almost a dozen films — most well worth watching. And as I think about it now, I should probably do a complete article on all of them, as I have for Bert I Gordon, Christopher R Mihm, and JR Bookwalter. It would be a good time! And since he hasn’t made any films since 1982, it would be complete.

One very interesting Jack Hill film is Blood Bath. It’s a pretty strange film that owes a lot to Mystery of the Wax Museum and A Bucket of Blood. But even stranger is the film’s production history. It all started with a Yugoslavian spy thriller, Portrait in Terror. Roger Corman hired Hill to use the footage to create a new, more commercial film. So Hill turned it into a horror film. Corman didn’t like it either. So he hired Stephanie Rothman to use Hill’s footage. Thus a film was born after only 3 years with as many directors!

In the early 1970s, he wrote and directed two blaxploitation films, Coffy and Foxy Brown. Pam Grier starred in both. Hill cast her in his previous two “women in cages” films. I think Coffy is the better of these. But you really can’t miss with any of Jack Hill’s films.

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Image cropped from Jack Hill in 1968 by The Los Angeles Times via UCLA Archive under CC BY 4.0.

Sci Fi Channel first showed Blood Monkey on 27 January 2007.

Today is not a good day for psychotronic film. I planned to highlight Joe Bob Briggs. But I saw the trailer for Blood Monkey and it looked great. Frankly, I’d rather highlight films than people anyway. And we’ve had some great ones. This month we featured Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter and Monster from Bikini Beach. So I made a bet.

An hour and a half later, I thought Joe Bob Briggs was looking mighty good! This film is beyond tedious. When most people say a film is bad, what they mean is that it is unprofessional. That’s not me, of course. As the two films listed above illustrate, I find much to delight me in low- and micro-budget features. This film is different.

It is very professional. F Murray Abraham leads a good cast. Overall, the production is fine. And the special effects work well enough. The problem is an absolutely awful screenplay, despite Gary Dauberman co-writing it. There’s lots of fake conflict but nothing more. If it had been directed better, it might have worked. After all, director Robert Young has done good things. And he seems to be trying very hard to make this work. But the shaky cam and overuse of close-ups only make things worse.

Finally, the monsters are hidden throughout the film. And when it shows up, it looks like King Kong. It is the most boring reveal I’ve ever seen on film.

There is one idea in the film that is genuinely clever. The characters are all in their tents for the night. It starts raining. Or so we think. But it stinks. The monkeys are peeing on the tents! The problem is this scene is rendered in such a casual way with only an establishing shot that it doesn’t work at all. As a viewer, I thought, “That’s… Wait… Is that?! Oh, the monkeys are peeing on them.” But what are you gonna do when you can’t show the monkeys until the end?!

Many filmmakers delight us with a bit of creativity and pocket change. But Blood Monkey is as creative as a corporate merger. Doubt me? I dare you to watch it!

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Blood Monkey (2007) poster via Wikipedia under Fair Use.

Rank Film Distributors released Kiss of the Vampire in the UK on 26 January 1964. Strangely, Universal Pictures released it earlier in the US. But I’m going with the UK release since it is a UK production.

The film has an interesting history. Hammer wanted it to be the third in its Dracula series. So that makes sense. The Brides of Dracula was the second film. And it is notable as the only film in the series that does not include Dracula. But that wasn’t a problem. I still consider it the second best of the nine-film series.

Kiss of the Vampire is excellent. I would rank it as highly as Brides. Both films show that you don’t need Dracula. Indeed, I find the character annoying. All you need is some rich bloodsucker and you are fine. Dracula comes with so much baggage. It limits what you can do. At the same time, the character just isn’t that interesting.

The plot is pretty well-known at this point. A young couple runs out of fuel in a remote area. They stay with a nobleman who is a vampire. The vampires abduct the woman. And the man fights to get her back. Gérard Brach stole the basic idea for Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers. I like Kiss a lot more — to a large extent because it doesn’t try to be funny.

On its release, the film got pretty much universal praise. Even stodgy film critic Leslie Halliwell wrote, “[It is] handled in lively fashion, with a splendid climax in which assorted white-robed vampires are destroyed by bats.” And psychotronic lover Michael Weldon wrote, “A superior vampire thriller set in Bavaria of 1910… [I]t’s one of the best…”

I highly recommend Kiss of the Vampire. And this is an excellent print. So enjoy!

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Kiss of the Vampire (1963) poster via Wikipedia under Fair Use.

Tobe Hooper was born on 25 January 1943.

Hooper is one of the Big Five horror directors, along with Wes Craven, George Romero, John Carpenter, and David Cronenberg. (Yes! It is all North America. Sometimes people substitute Dario Argento for Cronenberg.)

I love Tobe Hooper. He is the American Lucio Fulci. And that’s not entirely good. Hooper’s highs were very high. But his lows are pretty bad. For example, Night Terrors is an incomprehensible mess. But I think Hooper was just trying to make a living. He did manage to work almost exclusively in horror and science fiction. But that could be because no one imagined he could do anything else.

Regardless, I don’t like the way most people see his career. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre colored everything he did. It is a great film. See my discussion of the meathook scene. But the film is more a miracle of production than direction. And I am so tired of it — especially given his many other great films!

Hooper worked a lot in TV. He made notable TV movies like Salem’s Lot and Body Bags. But mostly, he directed TV episodes. And I’ll admit, I’ve never seen any of those. Maybe someday, I will write a thorough analysis of his work.

My favorite Tobe Hooper films are The Funhouse, Lifeforce, and Spontaneous Combustion. Critics didn’t much like any of them. But by the last of them, most critics didn’t even bother reviewing his films. That’s what critics are for: adding to the advertising budgets of already well-advertised films!

But since even Tobe Hooper fans tend to dismiss Spontaneous Combustion, let’s watch it! It is a trashy film. But that’s what it’s supposed to be. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Also, it is so demented from start to finish that I never get bored with it!

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Image cropped from Tobe Hooper by Lionel Allorge licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Ernest Borgnine was born on 24 January 1917.

The man won a Best Actor Academy Award for Marty. How can he be psychotronic?! Well, he worked a lot! He has 210 acting credits on IMDb — and one of those credits is 138 episodes of McHale’s Navy! He was in a number of psychotronic films.

Let me present one in particular: Willard. Borgnine plays the evil Al Martin. I cheer every time he dies! But Roger Ebert wrote something about this that I think is rather good. Ebert was a terrible film “critic.” But he was often an amusing writer:

“What is it in this film that touches some deep-buried nerve in the public psyche? Why does wholesome family entertainment fade away, while rats make millions? I’ve thought long and deeply on this subject, believe me, and I’ve reached a conclusion at last. People have waited a long time to see Ernest Borgnine eaten alive by rats, and now that they have their chance they aren’t going to blow it.”

This is, of course, a pretty standard catty comment by a film “critic.” I don’t think Ebert had a problem with Borgnine. It was just something funny to say. But it is clear that what Ebert wanted to see him in is not what I did. For example, I’m really not that fond of Marty. It’s fine. But it’s hard for me to understand what the big deal was.

Obviously, all psychotronic fans should watch Willard. But there are others. You have to see him as a Satanic cult leader in The Devil’s Rain. And he’s great as Dutch in The Wild Bunch. He plays a different religious leader in Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing. And, of course, he was the best thing in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. He was also in a few international films including two Italian ones: Super Fuzz (1980) and Code Name: Wild Geese (1984).

I started this figuring I would highlight Willard. But I’m just not in the mood for watching Ernest Borgnine eaten by rats. So let’s watch The Wild Bunch instead!

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Ernest Borgnine via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.